Bringing Up Flesh
by Talik Sanis
Summary: Through a series of her partner's painful moments, Arcee explores the disparities, affinities, and boundaries between man and machine.
1. Driven

Disclaimer: Transformers and its various incarnations are the property of Hasbro.

The first chapter is more or less an experiment in deviating from my usual style and an attempt to capture an alien mind, to limited effect.

* * *

His legs press into her sides. With a machine's memory, incapable of failure or error, it is their first meeting. She sees his eyes widen with terror. They flee. She feels the press. No, she realizes. She detects texture, weight, temperature. Because she is a machine, she can live in every sensation of memory, and she cannot feel. It is impossible to feel as does flesh. In fear, he clutches at her.

His legs press into her sides. With a machine's understanding of its self, a self-knowledge that is perfect, it is the now. She acknowledges his grip on her. She detects it. His seat shifts against hers. Each flex of muscle changes the distribution of weight. A heartbeat jolts through the flesh of him and the metal of her. She can count the ticks. This is not fear.

The grip on her is wet. His palms are wet, clammy. Fingers squeeze her tight.

She resists the urge to adjust her mirrors . She denies the natural and mechanical impulse to prod him. It is unusual to have a partner of flesh. She cannot upset him, throw him, or distract him. One distraction at the wrong time and a little thing of flesh and bone cannot weld together again like metal.

Traveling dirt roads gums her treads with earth and muck and stones. It threatens her scrabbling grip on the earth. It grinds. Sand and debris work their way inside her chassis, grinding at her and in her just the same.

He does too because he doesn't know any better. Inexperience distilled is simply a lack of knowledge. Flesh has an incredible lack of knowledge of itself. There is instinct, feelings ingrained into their hardware, but so little knowledge of the self or the other. A machine has background processes, core software that inspires or directs, but it knows its own code down to the last digit.

The flesh knows so very little; least of all that it's wearing her down, stripping her, shaving away metal in effusions of sparks.

He would hurt if she told him, feeling. He is so responsible and so self-critical when he fails to live up to the ideal of manhood. There would be pain, but not that kind of pain. It still couldn't be welded, though. Rather, it would be a pain common to flesh and metal. It would be a pain their kinds shared and pain they could share alike.

It is the moment his face cracks – the boy and the mother, speaking in a hanger. They stand before her, knowing that she is there, but not caring if she listens. For his mother's sake, he had put aside childish things and become a man. Yet now, a young man in body, in form, and in function, he is asked to be a boy once more. He had been the only man to stay with her, but now she replaces him. The flesh has an unlimited capacity to forget. It is their gift and curse to forget love and pain. It is their nature to replace, to fill holes and to make whole.

She will never forget Tailgate.

Her race replaces, yes. They replace parts, pieces of themselves, but they do not forget.

She will never forget Cliffjumper.

 _Partners_ are not like parts. With both, it is impossible to forget how they interface, the connections. However, a part ceases to be alive when it leaves the body - when the connections break. For a machine, a partner is always so horribly alive. There is never any fear of forgetting; there is only the fear of remembering. A machine lives in the eternal, certain fear of memory. That memory can be erased, but the mere thought is more terrifying than anything else. It is death, as much as a machine can die; death for the self as much as it is for the other.

Still, in the now, she understands the fleshling, his clutching her, his expression, and the anger that they both know is irrational. Thoughts are just electricity and chemical reactions, after all. Electricity and the secretion of hormones or transmission fluids make up the mind, the heart, and the mechanistic soul. At their cores they are the same: sparks. Should it truly be a surprise that she understands his thoughts?

They stop on a great swell of earth and the boy leaves her to rest on her kickstand.

He stands, looking out. Together they see a city, its brick and mortar discernible to eyes and optics both, its parks, and the shifting browns and greens of the hills and planes and shrubs that stretch off into the distance, broken only by the paved roadways that link town to town.

It is the day, the very moment, he determines to fight, and his eyes are hard and cool. He commits himself, and does not do so lightly. Clever boy.

It is the now; the fleshling is standing on a hill. His eyes are hard and cool.

The acrid musk of automobiles lies in the air, discernible only to a machine-perfect olfactory sense, overpowered by the earth and the trees.

His hands form fists, still clutching. He smells of salt and exertion and the light catches his face in just the right way to accent the thin film of stubble that traces his jawline.

He hiccups.

And his face twists into a cockeyed smile, the light now falling across his contorted features to accent the slight dimples of his cheeks while wiping clear the blood-dark flush of facial hair.

She laughs. It is the sound of a radio, something alive but somehow not, a tin sheet being struck and reverberating, a woman's voice, and feeling. He laughs in turn, looking back at her betrayed, but laughing just the same.

And they laugh together, crisp and uplifting.

The wind picks up, its whistle off-set by the rumble of a passing plane far, far overhead which only she can hear as the boy turns and approaches her. His expression blank, unreadable but not unkind, he reaches out to her.

A hand traces down her side, the pad of a thumb catching her gas cap as fingertips follow the outline of her frame. He pauses, hesitating, as his touch reaches her leather seat and lingers.

She feels, and does not feel, as the leather creaks in a dry grip.

His eyes are warm.

And he is warm – a warm little thing of flesh. His warmth presses into her. She feels it. Yes, but what kind of feeling is it? What kind can it be?

She is Cybertronian metal. Lacking an internal combustion engine, incapable of burning, she is cold and unyielding, yet the boy settles himself on the ground at her side, burrowing into her. Their combined weight runs through her wheels, his seat, and her kickstand into the ground.

And for a fleeting moment, she thinks that she can feel her warmth press into him.


	2. Metal

Was the flesh's capacity for terror limited? Was the physical matter a constraint? Some small segment of her circuitry was inquisitive.

Her gears upshifted. She acknowledged a thud that rumbled through her. A car passed her, going backwards, headlights flaring off of her rear-end. Even to a machine, in many ways traveling seemed like standing still. Going fast enough, with enough processing power diverted, it was the world that moved around her. It moved even as she weaved around vehicles in the darkness.

Everything came down to perspective.

A driver cursed her: being so reckless, she would spill out and die. That was not what he said, but it was what he meant. There were unkind words. No one else could have heard him, locked in his shell of plastic, glass, and metal - sealed up like a coffin. It was so different from riding a motorcycle.

When it came to failures of perspective, death was the same as driving. You did not die. The whole universe ceased to be. You were moving, but at the center of that universe, everything else changed.

Both the man and the vehicle sped off in the opposite direction, and eventually she lost sight of the front grill and hood ornament which displayed the same logo: a three-pointed star, the symbol of dominion over land, sea, and air. Fleshlings had so much room for arrogance.

A being of metal had a finite processor. There was only so much memory. At all times it was accounted for, known as she knew herself. She could deactivate all but her life sustaining functions, devote every inch of her being to fear, yet it would still be measurable. It would be calculable. Was the fleshly brain the same? Was the human mind? Was there a difference?

There had been terror when Cliffjumper died: the fear of loss and the fear of happiness and the fear of living all at once. Room had remained, though. In her, there had been space for blindness, for rage, and for self-recrimination. There had been sufficient room for fight. There had always been enough room for fight in her.

That small part of her that questioned faded away when a she exited the highway. She progressed along back roads.

If only she had been more diligent, fought harder, searched longer.

That they did not have energon enough to waste on a short-range ground bridge was enough to send her into a rage. It would have, if she had had enough space.

Soon she stopped. A fenced lot spread out around a set of squat buildings, and grim, armed men fanned out, running patrols. Floodlights cut through the gloom of newly-fallen night.

She reached outside of herself, scanners pinging off metal and being absorbed by brick and flesh.

Her rider shimmered above her, hands always to handlebars, seat always to seat, never leaving, never capable of leaving; the image of a fine, leather clad woman atop her seat was motionless, weightless, and ephemeral.

It hurt.

Today, alone, she somehow knew that she exceeded her operating capacity: she could feel more than her memory core allowed, more than there was space allotted to feeling.

Jack was gone.

She had known it, his mother had told her, but now she sensed it for herself.

Humans said that they could feel their emotions in the flesh. There were physiological changes - preparatory dilations, contractions, and secretions. One example she had found fascinating was that the lacrimal, paratoid, submandibular and other glands were inhibited, drying the mouth, making tears impossible. Everything unnecessary was shut down, limited, to preserve energy. How mechanical. Humans said that they could detect all of it. Terror felt like the heart was beating in the throat.

She almost believed that she could feel it too, in her metal and in her spark - feel the physical changes. Terror at the prospect of loss was so great, so vast, that, if realized, she thought that maybe, for the first time, it would leave no space left for anything else.

Maybe that was the answer. Human terror was limited not by the brain or the mind, if there was a distinction to be made, but by the heart. The heart could only take so much fear before it seized up, ceased to function, and stopped fighting to pump blood.

There was a great rush of fuel through her intake valve and her engine revved, loud and involuntary, when her sensors pierced and pinged in just the right way.

She passed the base, skirting its edge before progressing into the surrounding nature.

Animal noises, skittering, cries, howls, and cowering shivers, shook the air, but they were silent next to the roar of her engine. She bumped and rattled along uneven terrain, almost losing her traction on the loose earth and spilling out. The little fleshling was grinding her down even now.

Then she saw him in the distance, cross-legged and slumped over. Her sensor waves pinged back to her. On the horizon, under the night sky, a range of rock formations rippled, roughly equal to him in size given a failure of perspective. Her systems had not even corrected the visual error, though triangulation and identification of their distance and height would have been all but effortless; all her senses were fixed on analyzing the boy.

Her gears downshifted, slowing her sleek form as she drew nearer to him. When she had closed the span between them sufficiently, her side panels burst outwards, disjointed pieces of arms popping free, and the suddenly deformed motorcycle flipped end over end into the air. External plates shifted and retracted, gears whirred, dragged forward and pushed back, dormant power cells hummed to life, and optics flickered in an approximation of awakening, all of it accompanied by the familiar, comforting sound of transformation.

After carrying through a second flip, she landed on her newly revealed feet, the ground shuddering under the impact, organic debris and small rocks rattling into the air.

She pressed a finger to the side of her head, palm against her gray cheek.

"Ratchet?" she questioned into her comm.

"What is it?" The reply was terse, the voice tense. They almost always were with the medic, but only sometimes was it like this - so thick and hard that the old soldier could have used it as a shield. He so often did.

"I've got him." He sat there, still slouched so that he could rest his chin on a fist, ignoring her. "He's fine." She could be short with him in response. So much the better.

The medic let out a snort of compressed air and steam that she could almost feel through their link, releasing pressure.

"Well, then, that's good. Optimus will be pleased, at least." There was a grunt on the other end of the comm. unit. It rumbled soft and low, an exhalation almost like a sigh.

"Humans." He paused, as if anticipating her response, but she had nothing to give. "I'll tell his mother."

"Understood. Out." A servo whirred in her armored temple, and the channel collapsed with a soft tweet.

She stared at the fleshling's back. Having spent so much of herself in worrying, she hadn't even thought of what to do when she found him. Now, she could devote herself again. Millions of calculations per second could go to thinking of something to say.

He looked up at her, staring back with slanted eyes. The flexible alloy of her face bent under the force of her hand. Fingers pressed into her forehead, hiding her optics. She couldn't think of anything to say.

He solved her problem for her; he was such a good little partner.

"Arcee, haven't seen you in a while." He wouldn't stop looking at her. Her audioreceptors parsed out every tone and inflection. They broke his speech into its constituent parts. There was an instantaneous voice stress test and a linguistic analysis; a minuscule portion of her hardware was consumed. So much information was available to her, but she learned nothing other than that he was still watching her when he spoke. Sensory inputs and mathematical analysis and aural triangulation let her know his face was to her, even if she could only see the palm of her hand.

"Everyone thought that was best."

"Did they?" The words were spat, but there was no feeling there. How could that be? "You should have been there."

"Optimus, June, and Agent Fowler agreed that it would be best if you didn't have to deal with _everything_ for a while," she said, her optics still hidden behind the metal wall of her open palm.

"Did you?"

She had no reply, because she hadn't known at the time. She hadn't even known if she was thinking about what was best for him or for her. What a failure she was, so many times over; despite internal diagnostics, scanners that analyzed every thought, sensation, and feeling, and a mind capable of recording them, she was a machine who didn't know herself.

"You shouldn't have left the base," she chastised because it was expected, safe.

"Doesn't matter," he replied. "It's been a few weeks. I'm fine."

She brought her hand down to rake her optics over his flesh. What of his chest was not red and hotly inflamed was like paste. It really was. It was like a child's paste in a kindergarten classroom; like cheep glue holding the red together, working alongside the twisting patterns of stitches and sutures that traced over his body. The longest curved down the center of his chest, all the way down, his flesh welding together it its own slow, human way. At 35.56 centimeters, it was the largest of his nascent scars, but it was far from the most prominent.

"How did you get by the base patrols?" the machine asked. The worlds came out in a slur of sound. She could move her mouth and tongue, she could speak, almost as quickly as she could think. Torpid human flesh did not restrain her. Somehow he understood.

"It wasn't that hard." He shrugged one shoulder. "I wasn't under guard. They're meant to keep people out."

"Pretty impressive, nonetheless, especially given the terrain. Not much cover." She scratched at the back of her neck. There was no itch – there could not be an itch – but it was a human gesture and habit. She recognized it, and pistons deep in her throat hissed. "You know that there was no other choice, right, even with all of Fowler's resources, there are limits."

"That's the second reason I was able to get out," he said, wagging a finger to the front and side of his head, a vaguely scolding gesture. He smiled. It was bitter. She could almost taste it, if she could taste.

"We humans have always been pretty incompetent next to you. Every time it's the same thing: you save us because we can't. We're useless."

With a single titanic step, she was at his side, kneeling. "You know better than that, partner."

"So do you. You always have. You don't need a partner."

She placed her folded hands on her knees and her cheek on her hands so she could stare down at the fleshling beside her. "Does any human need a Mercedes?"

There was no verbal response, though she recorded blood flow, the pulse in his throat, muscle clenches, blinks, breaths, and everything else there was to see and hear. More important than anything else, he simply looked away.

"That doesn't mean that a Mercedes can't bring you happiness." She slid her hand out. It had been foolish to trap them, even for a moment. Her thumb pressed into his cheek, into new divots and protrusions, and she felt his cheek press into her thumb, his body and head tilting.

"Was that supposed to be flattery?" he asked with a familiar, if wilted, smirk, almost hidden by her digit.

"Absolutely." There was enough confidence in her to wink at him, the mechanism inside her eye snapping shut and open like a camera shutter as it took a picture, preserved a moment. Her precise thumb stroked upwards, lifting, falling, and then moving up again and again. "Have you ever seen a 'bot with a Mercedes alt mode? The company makes some gorgeous cars."

"That's true." He withdrew to nod, head twisted to four point two degrees. Blood vessels underneath the smooth, still-olive portions of the skin on his face opened wide. His eyes were on the ground. "But I've always been more partial to motorcycles."

"At least you have taste."

"Yeah, well, you gotta have something, right?" he said with a shaky grin as he ran his right hand down his body, skimming the flesh with the very tip of his middle finger. The other arm rested strangely limp at his side, pointing straight down. He explored the ugly, stinging redness over his body. He didn't touch his face.

"God knows I don't have looks."

Her optics burned dark blue, their light spilling out onto his body, and she saw that it forced him to look up at her. She smiled at him so very softly that she could feel it; it was simply too soft to be made of metal.

"You look fine to me, partner."

She placed her fingertip to the space between his bare shoulder and chest, passing over ridges, the bulge of the deep framework that gave the little fleshling his shape. A motion, its pressure mechanically light but humanly soft, carried her touch down across the band of iron muscle in his upper arm. The smooth, silver gray appendage, longer than his whole limb, reached the joint at the middle of his arm, and she placed her thumb to it, opposite her forefinger. She pressed in, manipulating.

The arm bent.

She could hear the internal grind that was audible only to a machine. There was a pop of bone that they could both detect as he reached over with his other arm, ribs shifting and an air bubble bursting in his shoulder; pieces of the skeleton reallocated. A hand found her, and she registered the pressure.

Her fingers, a vice, skimmed along to his forearm and pulled down with infinitesimal force. It caused him to surrender to its weakness, she felt, given her strength. His arm straightened.

Her thumb withdrew, leaving the forefinger to find the boy's palm. She pressed down. Nothing gave, but the arm itself fell a few inches. It was only when she triggered some mental reflex and his fingers curled up to scrape the underside of her index that she realized that, had she possessed a fingerprint, it would have been larger than his whole palm. How could she not have realized that before?

He was such a tiny, fragile thing of flesh and blood and fire and steel. She could see it all in his eyes: gooey marble matter, bloodshot lines, smoky embers, and something rigid that supported everything else but was now hiding just at the edge of sight in the corner of his eye, seen out of the corner of her optics. The fundamental composition was the same as it had been. Eventually, his eyes would be as they were.

Her hand curled around his whole body. Careful not to bruise him in her gentle grip, careful even though her grip was machine precise and could not hurt him, she lifted him up. Then, the machine sat, folding her legs, and rolled flat on her back.

She could see him, eyes suddenly alive and wide, mouth drooping, as she laid him down on her; feet on her stomach, head on her breastplate, face between the slopping metal curves.

"I'm sorry, Jack," the machine said. "I'm sorry for leaving you alone." The tip of a somehow supple metal thumb ran through his hair; she felt the strands, every one, as they parted at her touch. She felt him tremble at the cold of it and the heat of it.

"And I'm sorry for not being there."

She felt reverent hands on her. They traced outwards to their limit, one running smooth and the other harsh. He pushed up and over, without the slightest shake of effort, lying on her as she lay on the ground. His arms splayed out, palms up, fingers curling. The backs of them were on her. She detected the warmth, and she detected the cold.

"You didn't know what was happening, what she was doing; there was nothing you could have done," the young man said, a teasing strike with his cold knuckles ringing off the thinner, flexible portion of her chassis just under her chest armor.

Her hands drew in, fingers lacing over her chest, over his body like an interlocking metal blanket. Gooseflesh prickled over his shirtless torso; she saw that he felt the cold of her metal that was like his.

"I'll kill her this time, Jack," she said, pressing her fingers into the flesh of his chest. It indented under the pressure. She sensed it, but knew that her touch was too light to pop the stitches or sutures. "I swear I will."

He turned his face to the side, resting his cheek against her chest and then moving his head to stroke her armour with his cheek in circular patterns.

"It doesn't matter."

Her irises winked again, and she bared her teeth in another human gesture, but his face was unmoving and he was unmoved. After watching him, her internal chronometer counting the seconds with atomic precision, finally she inclined her head. Her grip tightened, just enough, she knew from the change in blood flow, the shift in his heartbeat, and the look on his face, for him to feel it.

"As for you, if you ever pull something like this again." She let the threat hang, building, and moved one hand to squeeze his arm between her thumb and finger hard enough to shatter bone, to sever a limb. Other than the grinds and pops and gurgles of a living being, the noise of his heavy breathing, and the rapid beat of his heart, he didn't even let out a sound, the silly, fragile little thing of flesh and bone and blood and fire and steel. "I'll put you in traction."

He, upside-down, snorted up at her face as she looked down at him with glowing, silver-blue optics that refocused and analyzed every inch of him, that now knew every inch perfectly.

"Let's see you sneak away then."

He chuckled into her breastplate, his chest shuddering. The motion twisted over time. His whole body shuddered. She smelled salt – her olfactory sensors detected it – heard his gasping breaths and tiny impacts, felt his tears as they fell on her armor.

"Jack," she began, though the fleshling would neither settle nor look up to her, "I was wrong. You're nothing like a Mercedes. The most a car can do is make you happy."

She looked out at the empty terrain as her fingers tightened around him, her thumb stroking along his spine. An indistinct path led back to the base. Passed that, beyond the limits even of her sight was the winding roadway back to town and to Jack's home.

It was obvious that he was nothing like a luxury automobile. Were the war to end, she could imagine that happiness would fill her, consume her entire mechanical processing capacity. Yet joy transcended all physical limitations. Oh, what a wonderful thought. It was beyond circumstance.


End file.
